Equifax. 143 MILLION Americans — SSNs, birthdates, addresses, the immutable keys to whole identities — exfiltrated from a company most victims never chose to do business with. The failure chain is a full curriculum: a known Apache Struts vulnerability, patch available in MARCH, unpatched through JULY (the WannaCry sermon, #107, re-preached with the entire adult population as congregation); a breach discovered in July and disclosed in SEPTEMBER; executives who sold stock in between (they say unknowingly); a response site that was itself so sketchy that browsers flagged it; and — my personal favorite artifact of the whole disaster — their Argentina portal reportedly secured with admin/admin. You cannot rotate your SSN. The data model of American identity assumes secrets that half the internet now holds. The real fix isn’t Equifax-shaped, it’s architectural: identity systems built on credentials that can be REVOKED. (The Apple-FBI file, #077, keeps gaining appendices.)
Meanwhile, in intentional-identity news, Apple announced the iPhone X: the home button is dead, the bezel is dead, and your FACE is the password now. Face ID’s threat model deep-dive (attention detection, secure enclave, 1-in-a-million false-accept) landed the same fortnight 143M unrevocable identifiers hit the dark web. The contrast is the entire lesson: one industry designs secrets that can’t be stolen at rest; another warehouses secrets that can’t be changed after theft. The notch is fine. Everyone will copy it by 2019 (#090’s courage clause, re-invoked).
TIL: our patch-latency metric now has an SLO and a dashboard, effective this sprint. Days-to-patch-critical: the only vanity metric that isn’t.